On Aug 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote:
> My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite being
> behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. When I back up my laptop to my NAS over
> my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" traffic by your
> definition.
>
> I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most
> people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm confused.
It matches my mental model. Your network is connected to the Internet, that's
traffic between two hosts, it's Internet traffic.
Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and let's put
them on the same network behind a NAT just like your home, but at a coffee
shop. Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent and our two machines
exchange data.
That's Internet traffic, isn't it? Two unrelated people talking over the
network? They just happen to be on the same LAN.
My definition was arbitrary, so feel free to argue another arbitrary definition
is more useful in some way, but for my arbitrary definition you've applied the
rules correct, and I would argue it's the right way to think about things. In
a broad english sense "IP packets traversing an Internet connected network are
Internet traffic".
It's all graph cross sections. "Peering" volume totals a set of particular
links in the graph, omitting traffic from your laptop to your file server, or
your NAS to your laptop. My model attempts to isolate every edge on the graph,
and generate the total sum of IP traffic crossing any Internet connected
network, which would always include all forms of local caches (Akamai, Google,
Netflix) and even your NAT. I think that's a more interesting number, and a
number that's easier to count and defend than say a peering or "backbone"
number.
--
Leo Bicknell - [email protected] - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
